papa

Yes. I could stomach the ads during the TV programs but the commercial breaks during Hulu-streamed movies really sucked. There's definitely something to be said for the commercial-free programming available via Netflix streaming.

The Hulu Plus content was also disappointing (compared to what's offered on the free Hulu site).

"Be ready to follow the community; that is, the community might end up in a slightly/vastly different place than you intended. That’s okay; embrace it."

Spot on with this one. If you fail to embrace where the community is pulling you, you might miss out on a bigger business opportunity than the one you originally envisioned.

Assuming Apple can eventually get more of the networks and cable channels to share their content with the AppleTV the remaining big impediment for a consumer like me is live sports.

I'd gladly pay for a live and on-demand archive for my favorite sports teams (and/or leagues) streamed in HD to my television. I know there are cable/satellite options for this as well as some internet/broswer-based ones but is there any solution currently bundled into any of the Roku/Boxee/AppleTV devices?

That could be a component. I can't put my finger on the other ones, and it was just a slapdash thought, but I'd just love a scorecard that maybe considered: predictive success, factual error rate/truthyness (e.g. do they make frequent bogus claims?, known biases and employer(s).

It's not really realistic to comprehensively log all of this, of course. But it sure would help me assessing the relative quality of some sources, especially now that sources for news are so varied and fragmented. I suppose in the past the reputation of a publication served some of this purpose (i.e. WSJ or NYTimes having stellar reputations).

I knew of a couple of databases for equity analyst performance like Starmine and Bulldog Research. So those do exist. Not sure if either are still around since I'm no longer in the finance space.

It's too bad there's no way to assign a universal "reputation" score to the various pundits out there so that readers can better assess the value of their published predictions. Michael Pachter, for instance, has been wrong on a number of occasions (he predicted Sony would dominate the current console generation and Nintendo would languish and MSFT would be #2 -- at least he got the last part right).

Like the iPad which many pundits couldn't figure out, the consumers never wrote off Netflix and that's pretty much all that matters.

There's so much wrong with this statement I don't even know where to start: "By staging a series of perceived technology innovations and then adding price decoys, reference prices, obscurity, and bundling, Apple makes us willing to pay more to do the same stuff we did 30 years ago."

Really Ben Kunz? In 1980 I could have a live video chat with my mother? Make movies with a device that fits in my pocket? Access sample chapters to thousands of newly published books without leaving my home? Yeah, I didn't think so. But I suppose he thinks I've been duped just like all the other sheeple out there...

For a personal finance "classic" in this vein, I recommend "Your Money or Your Life" by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relations...

The book has some interesting things to say about the value of time and, at the very least, forces you to think about the trade-offs of time, money, work and consumption. There's a particularly sobering exercise in the book that has you consider how many productive, non-sleeping hours you have left in your life which provided me with some new perspective I hadn't considered.

Sounds like an interesting product, but the oddly shaped case seems to reinforce the fact that this will be a niche product: http://www.boxee.tv/box

Might seem like a shallow/trivial thing, but I don't really want that thing atop my pile of a/v components.

Ah, I thought you had "rolled-your-own" for the verification solution. If you went off the shelf, you can't really leverage it as you say.

By the way, here's a hacker news equivalent for internet marketing that I've found useful (since marketing is a key component of audience building): http://sphinn.com/

Good luck!

You're in a bit of a predicament with the verified name aspect. On the one hand it is an interesting idea, on the other it creates a lot of friction with respect to users creating fully-functioning accounts. The process is so onerous (by web-standards, mind you), that it'll be tough to get many users participating at the outset on a nascent site.

I'd also consider narrowing or focusing on a specific topical niche (possibly with a better brand-name that might give a n00b some hints about what the site is and what it can do).

I see you have also seeded the site with some content, but you may also need to artificially seed the site with some user participation (via "fake" accounts). I know this runs counter to your idea of "real/verified" users, but one of the toughest things about growing a userbase is convincing people that there's some worthwhile activity going on at your site to begin with. If they arrive and there's no discussion taking place, most of them will just as soon leave (there's no compelling reason for them to register to comment to nobody when they can just as soon go register at reddit or hacker news to talk to folks).

You should also look at using SEO urls for a lot of your pages. So rather than http://lonava.com/stories/314687, use a url like http://lonava.com/stories/sonys-hirai-were-over-10-years-fro...

Once you fix some of the simple stuff, you can start taking a crack at things like link-building, link-bait, link exchanges, forum postings, ad-word campaigns and viral strategies.

So I have no panacea for you. Growing an audience can sometimes require a number of small tactical moves.

One last thought: In a prior job I had worked on an account verification product. There many, many companies out there who are interested in such technologies for a variety of purposes (usually for financial transactions). Your application may have a hidden gem beneath the surface that is more valuable than the aggregator: the identity verification component. You might want to look at some of the verification solutions out there and see if there's some opportunity for you.

Correct. The top tier accounts are $995/month and one of the nifty features are the custom domain short names which, I suppose, provide some nice branding (e.g. amazon.com becomes amzn.to/2U08Yn). The analytics tools are probably also of some value.

The unlucky point is so true. All kinds of crazy costs and snafus will sneak up and knock you off your feet. Taking care to plan ahead always helps, but having that new server go dead or finding some unexpected legal fees or finding an unanticipated tax bill in the mail can really knock you off your game for a few days.

Just be sure to keep some emergency cash reserves on hand if you can afford to do so. It can save your sanity and your company (I've had 2 instances where the cash reserves have saved my company's behind: (1) was for a costly rescue from DriveSavers and (2) was for some hefty but worthwhile legal fees from an unexpected legal dispute.

This is the big clearing-house site for businesses for sale (it includes offline and online businesses):

http://www.bizbuysell.com/

I haven't used it personally, but a friend of mine is always raving about it for idea generation and small biz opportunities.

If you really wanted to show off that you had an iPhone you'd probably at least want to say: "Sent from my White iPhone 4, 32GB with Retina Display" ;-)

But seriously, I imagine most people who have this signature in their mobile emails have no idea how/where to change or disable it. The other reasons you cite are legitimate possibilities, but probably to a much lesser extent.

I've run into problems with hitting a number of limits on Analytics as well and still have no good solution.

A couple of solutions I'm aware of:

1) Omniture Site Catalyst: A lot of big sites use this but it will cost you dearly. My site runs about 85mm pvs/month and they quoted me close to a million dollars a year at those traffic levels! I didn't even bother negotiating it down, even the negotiated price would still have been way more than I'm willing to pay.

2) Urchin: I don't know how similar/dissimilar Urchin is from Analytics, but the Urchin 6 software runs about $3k. This option could prove labor intensive since you would effectively be running and logging your own metrics on your own server. So the actual costs could go up (wrt to time, equipment, etc.)

There are plenty of smaller players in this space, but the problem that always comes up is, "Will these guys be around in a year?". When looking for an business solution, it's nice to know that your data won't up and disappear should the company go bankrupt.

I do wish Google would provide a paid service for those of us that could use it and would pay for it. I'm already using Google Doubleclick for Publishers for ad serving (which costs money), you'd think they'd also want to expand their other complementary offerings (like metrics).

Kotkin definitely has an axe to grind with respect to "traditional urbanism". Among urban studies circles he's often criticized for his "anti-urban" (i.e. pre-automobile/highways urbanity) stance and his pro-suburban views.

If you read his works he seems to relish predicting the downfall of San Francisco (a Disneyland city in his mind) and Los Angeles.

He's certainly not as outright crazy as Wendell Cox (another noted anti-urbanist), but I certainly don't agree with much of of what he writes.

That's not to say all that he has to say is bunk. He usually raises a lot of good issues. But it is worth, as you suggest, noting some of his clear biases.

Well it is possible to work for a tech company and stay in SF. You just need to work with a more restrictive set of job requirements. I got tired of doing the long commute in 2003 and decided to only look at companies within the city limits. It took a year to find something I really liked, but it was life-changing to be able to work and live in the same place and avoid the 50-mile one-way commute.

And, of course, you can start and operate your company out of SF (which is what I eventually did as well).

Totally agree. The iPad is my "couch-surfing" computer of choice these days. You really can curl up with this sucker or lie on your back comfortably while reading.

I've been using it for most of my reading (newspapers, books, magazines). A lot of my surfing and a lot more video consumption than I had expected.

The sketching apps are great. I bought a little stylus to help out where fingers fall short. I'm doing a lot more drawing than ever b/c of the facility and convenience of drawing on the pad.

The comic book readers are great (I use comic reader mobi). I hadn't read a comic or graphic novel in years, but they just looks so gorgeous on the ipad that I've been voraciously catching up on various comics that I would have otherwise ignored.

I find myself using the iphone much less when at home and the laptop has been relegated to "work"/upright/serious stuff.

iPad, for me, is something of a leisure computer. If that makes any sense...

thank you sir!

Good strategy. I was expecting the same.

There was an interesting link to a public google doc with a load of interesting startup/product ideas a few days back. I forgot to bookmark it and am having trouble locating it via google. Anyone know the link I'm talking about?

Filling out paperwork to commit to more bandwidth from our colocation facility as the monthly overages are getting high.

Guess you gotta spend money to make money :-|

So true on Prime for Christmas, they should really advertise that angle much more during the holidays for those averse to crowded malls.

I also love the fact that the 2-day shipping often comes in 1 day b/c of the efficiency of Amazon's warehouse/distribution network.

Re: mobile payments, I'm assuming you've heard of companies like Zong, Paymo and Boku. It's a much better userxp than Paypal and much more accessible payment method for the under-21 crowd.

Alternately, I wonder if this move will hasten the newspaper's decline. If traditional newspapers/media remove themselves from the Google Index it creates a huge opportunity for new media outlets (huffingtonpost and other online verticals), smaller tier players, other intermediaries (bloggers and the like).

It's not like consumers are going to stop using Google for these types of searches overnight. And it's not like they won't continue to find great content (albeit not from "blue chip" outlets like WSJ, NYTimes, etc.). Combine that with the decline in relevance of traditional outlets wrt the younger generation (I imagine the same dynamic that makes Jon Stewart the most highly regarded news broadcaster in the U.S. also pertains to the < 30something regard for traditional media brands) and you have a pretty dismal outlook for old media made even more dismal by the outright ceding of their Google traffic (if it comes to pass).

But I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out. If you're a smaller, up-and-coming online media player though, you've got to be licking your chops.

I spent a couple of years at Yodlee. Your comment is spot-on. Not only are there huge headaches around creating the scripts/feeds to grab the data, but once you have the data there's a significant challenge of normalizing it so that you have some sort of data consistency. And then you have the issue of constantly having to update the scripts as financial institutions make (often undocumented and unannounced) changes to their data.

The Abobe:Youtube / Yodlee:Mint analogy in the article isn't entirely apt since Yodlee effectively provides not only the technology but the content upon which Mint is built. I'd agree with those who say that Mint's position is tenuous from a business perspective b/c of this (and maybe this is why they opted to make their exit). But I certainly can't take away from the fact that Mint built a fantastic product that blows away any other front-end implementations of this sort.

I agree with you, but imho Yahoo should have made these decisions years ago. Yahoo has clearly made a lot of bets it hasn't been able to follow through on (acquisition bets alone tell a sorry tale: Broadcast, Geocities, Inktomi, Overture).

When I was at Yahoo during the "dot bomb" crash. Yahoo was scrambling to decrease its reliance on advertising and made a big push into premium/paid subscriptions. Well that fizzled. As did Terry Semel's entertainment strategy and the subsequent attempt to go toe-to-toe with GOOG.

Personally, I like the entertainment/media portal strategy (out of the remaining options available). But at this point it still feels like Yahoo is being pushed into this strategy rather than boldy pushing forward with it. I think that's partially why it feals more like defeat/retreat at this point than anything else. Present-day Yahoo just can't shake that feeling of failure/lost opportunity in the eyes of many observers. That's gonna hound them for a long time until they can garner up a bona fide hit.

"...that the plural of anecdote is data..."

Thank you for this most excellent quote. I got a good laugh out of that quip.

This sounds like my schedule. After the kids are asleep, I usually do the same (though it's more like 10pm-1am).

As for sleep. I get about 5-6 hours. I wake up at 7am, at the latest, on weekdays to get the kids to school. On weekends I'll get more sleep (like midnight to 8 am).

It works for me.

Lol, I first read that as kid v2.5

Sometimes I do feel that kids deserve their own version numbers. After potty training you jump from like v.95 to v5.0 ...or so I felt :-)

2 kids. 7 year old and 3 year old. Started my current company when kid #2 was born (maybe not the recommended course of action for everyone, but I survived).

People ask me what my hobbies are these days it's pretty much (1) the kids and (2) the website.

In fact, I'd say the website is almost like a 3rd kid. Once that thing went public it was 24/7 just like a kid! And it even wakes you up at the least opportune times like a kid.

But I do find that with kids I'm forced to be resourceful and disciplined. I sleep less and make do with what little "me" time I have to get things done. I also find that I'm forced to prioritize things more (triage becomes really important when faced with greater time constraints).